Inside the mind of an autistic savant

Autistic savant Daniel Tammet shot to fame when he set a European record for the number of digits of pi he recited from memory (22,514). For afters, he learned Icelandic in a week. But unlike many savants, he’s able to tell us how he does it. We could all unleash extraordinary mental abilities by getting inside the savant mind, he tells Celeste Biever

Do you think savants have been misunderstood – and perhaps dehumanised – in the past?

Very often the analogy has been that a savant is like a computer, but what I do …